Gonna have to go with HA. Now that Senators are publicly elected just like members of the House and traditional state-specific interests are becoming less and less prevalent (outside of, say, Alaska), it’s not like Senators really exist anymore simply as an arm of the state government to advance a very narrow agenda for that state. So really, the whole purpose of the Senate has kinda been nullified and now it’s just a less representative House. No modern American voter recognizes the intended institutional difference between the House and the Senate, they just vote for two representatives in Congress.

There’s no reason why rural voters deserve a voting handicap because racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, etc. minority groups don’t get any voting handicap. This is why the “big cities will run the country and no one will care about the poor North Dakotan farmer!” argument doesn’t work with me, because why should we go out of our way to give one minority group (rural voters) electoral protection but not grant that protection to any other minority group whose interests may be overridden by the majority? It’s inconsistent.

Gonna have to go with HA. Now that Senators are publicly elected just like members of the House and traditional state-specific interests are becoming less and less prevalent (outside of, say, Alaska), it’s not like Senators really exist anymore simply as an arm of the state government to advance a very narrow agenda for that state. So really, the whole purpose of the Senate has kinda been nullified and now it’s just a less representative House. No modern American voter recognizes the intended institutional difference between the House and the Senate, they just vote for two representatives in Congress.

There’s no reason why rural voters deserve a voting handicap because racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, etc. minority groups don’t get any voting handicap. This is why the “big cities will run the country and no one will care about the poor North Dakotan farmer!” argument doesn’t work with me, because why should we go out of our way to give one minority group (rural voters) electoral protection but not grant that protection to any other minority group whose interests may be overridden by the majority? It’s inconsistent.

A federal state (like the US) needs aa chamber of territorial representation where 1 constituent government = 1 vote. So the US Senate works really great in that regard. I also like the staggered elections.

My only nitpick would be that not all states have Senate election every year. I would personally increase the number of Senators to 150 (3 per state) so that all states elect 1 of their 3 senators every 2 years, with 6 year terms

If the dis-proportionality between the populations of different units was kept to a sensibly low level, and the boundaries of the states actually reflected rational and concise geopolitical units, then it would not be that awful. But neither of these exist in any form. State borders have been drawn in an extremely arbitrary way that in no way has anything to do with any of the community of interests that exist across the country, and the disproportional population distribution between states reaches an insanely high factor of more than 64. States like the Dakotas and Wyoming are so small that they are essentially rump areas that are devoid of anything resembling a cohesive community of interest within their borders, while states like California, Texas, New York, and Florida contain a wide range of vastly different groups of communities of interests within their borders that they really have no actual shared identity spanning the whole state. The Senate by the way does not do anything to actually protect rural areas over urban areas in general. It only protects very specific rural areas. Certainly, the people in areas like Interior California, Northern California, Upstate New York, Downstate Illinois are distinct rural areas completely drowned out by the structure of the US Senate despite having more people in them than a number of rural states. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside Combined Statistical Area in California has nearly 3 times the population as that of the average US State, yet does not even have just a single state to itself. Also in California, the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland Combined Statistical Area also has more people than the average US State does, yet both of them along with a vast number of other areas are all lumped into the state of California.

The big problem I have with the Senate is that it's too powerful. Plenty of countries have upper houses that aren't explicitly democratic, but they are constitutionally subordinate to the lower house. The American Senate however, despite being blatantly anti-democratic is even more powerful and senior to the (democratic) House of Reps. The power

People who think the Senate isn’t representative enough clearly don’t understand the purpose of the Senate to begin with.

On the contrary, most are very aware of the purpose of the Senate, just disagree with that purpose. This is a very weak argument I've seen trotted out to defend the institution, but it could easily also be used to argue in favour of, say, the Estates General or the old House of Lords.

Artificially-created territorial subdivisions have no legitimacy to demand the sort of special representation such a body provides. The only situation in which it makes any sense is a confederal state where each unit has natural and unique distinctions from the other, which is obviously not the case for units with straight line borders. I am sure the people arguing for 'states rights' on this issue would change their tune were there five Californias instead of two Dakotas.

People who think the Senate isn’t representative enough clearly don’t understand the purpose of the Senate to begin with.

On the contrary, most are very aware of the purpose of the Senate, just disagree with that purpose. This is a very weak argument I've seen trotted out to defend the institution, but it could easily also be used to argue in favour of, say, the Estates General or the old House of Lords.

I won't defend feudalism; but the UK is a unitary country; the US is a federation. That's why the House of Lords makes little sense; but the US senate does.

I generally believe that centralized countries should generally have unicameral legislatures and federal/decentralized countries should have powerful senates like the US one.

On that note, I wonder why Canada's Senate has so little power and is not appointed in a 1 province = 1 vote fashion.

People who think the Senate isn’t representative enough clearly don’t understand the purpose of the Senate to begin with.

On the contrary, most are very aware of the purpose of the Senate, just disagree with that purpose. This is a very weak argument I've seen trotted out to defend the institution, but it could easily also be used to argue in favour of, say, the Estates General or the old House of Lords.

I won't defend feudalism; but the UK is a unitary country; the US is a federation. That's why the House of Lords makes little sense; but the US senate does.

I generally believe that centralized countries should generally have unicameral legislatures and federal/decentralized countries should have powerful senates like the US one.

On that note, I wonder why Canada's Senate has so little power and is not appointed in a 1 province = 1 vote fashion.

The US is far more centralized than you seem to think. Almost every issue in the current period of time ends up getting decided by SCOTUS, and ends up affecting every state in the process.

Gonna have to go with HA. Now that Senators are publicly elected just like members of the House and traditional state-specific interests are becoming less and less prevalent (outside of, say, Alaska), it’s not like Senators really exist anymore simply as an arm of the state government to advance a very narrow agenda for that state. So really, the whole purpose of the Senate has kinda been nullified and now it’s just a less representative House. No modern American voter recognizes the intended institutional difference between the House and the Senate, they just vote for two representatives in Congress.

There’s no reason why rural voters deserve a voting handicap because racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, etc. minority groups don’t get any voting handicap. This is why the “big cities will run the country and no one will care about the poor North Dakotan farmer!” argument doesn’t work with me, because why should we go out of our way to give one minority group (rural voters) electoral protection but not grant that protection to any other minority group whose interests may be overridden by the majority? It’s inconsistent.

Each existing State has equal representation so seems like a FA to me.

That is completely untrue. Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, and West Virginia each have far more Senate representation than California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Virginia do.

No...? Lol.

I think what Solid4096 is trying to refer to is voting power, i.e. that the voting power of a citizen in the smallest state of Wyoming is about 67 times that of a citizen in the largest state of California. Though taking his response literally, considering it was responding to "[e]ach existing State has equal representation," he was incorrect literally speaking, yes.